About common/community senses. Critical interpellations from epistemic, political and ecological perspectives

Abstract

The article interweaves the contributions of Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, inviting to a reflection on the construction of their epistemic-political perspectives, in order to think our regional and local present, crossed by multiple socio-environmental and socio-territorial movements and resistances. We recover the contributions of these thinkers in the conviction that some of the categories they propose are very fruitful for the understanding of the meanings and scope of social resistances in our conflictive Latin American present. The reflection is based on three axes: the epistemic, the political and the ecological, which we consider intensely intertwined and based on a principle of reality that demands profound counter-hegemonic global transformations.

From Latin American philosophy we critically question the social sciences and humanities as a political epistemic practice that contributes to an emancipatory construction of knowledge from our America, an interpellation that puts us on the road to rethink our modes of knowledge production, our forms of sociability with its symbolic universes, the ways of inhabiting them and the power relations that cross them. All of them are thought, from the contributions of Escobar and Santos, as political practices that may be able to face the advance of hegemonic globalizations. Their theoretical proposals place us on the starting point of a political imagination aimed at working on the displacement of the common sense of the modern West, in order to work on the creation of new common senses, capable of building other perspectives that can overcome the fundamental contradiction between the finitude of nature as an expropriable resource and the infinity of capitalist accumulation.